


ships in the night

by elliptical



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Alternate Universe - Successful Rebellion, Body Horror, Multi, Unfinished, helmsmen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 05:08:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7208993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You put the tech away and pass your hand in front of the scanner for clearance.  "Apparently the engine room is some kind of garden so, this is pretty weird."</p>
<p>A crackle of static, and Zahhak's voice comes through.  "Ah.  Commander, perhaps it would be best if you" -- and the door swishes open.</p>
<p>"<i>Oh my god what the fuck.</i>"</p>
<p>"Fiddlesticks."</p>
            </blockquote>





	ships in the night

**Author's Note:**

> i started writing this fic as an intended oneshot two years ago, before i wrote the to own a galaxy verse - i just found it in my drafts and never finished it. i might finish it if there's enough interest but anyway here's the unfinished product, since there are enough differences between this and the to own a galaxy verse that i figure it's worth posting

This is the worst fucking idea that anybody has ever had in the history of terrible fucking ideas, and this is coming from a guy who backed a barely-molted Heiress above doing his due diligence to the overbearing Empire that wanted to kill him.

You are Karkat Vantas, wannabe Imperial Threshecutioner and rebellion leader, and you have just gotten a promotion. Turns out successful takedowns of terrible governments come with perks besides getting to live another night. Among these are sudden tasks and responsibilities heaped onto your shoulders, because for some reason the new Empress doesn't quite trust any of the older adults who just had their leader brutally murdered. Which means that it falls to you to investigate the lower levels of the Battleship Condescension and make sure no one is hiding out.

(If anyone is hiding out, you reason, they're doing so because they're pants-shittingly terrified, and you can probably help them survive without needing to remove any heads from necks. Hopefully. Maybe.)

You should probably have backup with you, but fuck if you aren't about to embrace your shitty destiny as the first guy to die in a horror flick, and besides your comms channel is open. To fill the eerie silence, you mutter into your wrist in a steady stream of updates and curses. It's fucking creepy down here. The walls are seamless metal all the way through but they're damp with moisture coming from who-knows-where, and you can feel the humidity in your chest, in the back of your throat. When you press your fingers to the walls they thrum just slightly under your fingertips, the softest purr imaginable, and every tiny sound echoes.

The ship itself feels alive, fuck the potential for hiding army members.

Every stairwell you've checked has been empty, and you've been sweeping with your tech for signs of life before you open doors, sickle clenched tight in your free hand, and everything comes up negative until you reach the engine room.

The engine room is full of life.

Dozens of life forms detected, crawling up the walls, slithering across the floor, curling around struts of metal. The screen in front of you looks like it's illustrating a lot of ropy, twisted worms, same life signs all the way through. Some kind of anchored flora, you hope. Nothing sentient enough to attack you, you hope.

You put the tech away and pass your hand in front of the scanner for clearance. "Apparently the engine room is some kind of garden so, this is pretty weird."

A crackle of static, and Zahhak's voice comes through. "Ah. Commander, perhaps it would be best if you" -- and the door swishes open.

" _Oh my god what the fuck._ "

"Fiddlesticks."

The room is pulsing with fuchsia cables, rising up from a shallow pool in the middle of the room and wrapping into a column like vines around a trellis, others snaking down from the ceiling and anchoring themselves to the walls. The unmarred metal tiles in front of you are slick with water, the humidity almost unbearable.

And there is a dead troll in the center of the column.

"Zahhak what the fuck is this," you say. "Zahhak. What the fuck, what the fuck, there's a dead guy in here."

A pause. "Are you absolutely certain he is dead? No vital signs?"

"What the fuck kind of question is that!"

"Scan him, if you please."

You nearly drop the scanner as you pull it back out of your pocket, keeping your breathing steady and even. The atmosphere of this place sets your teeth on edge, keeps your blood pusher thrumming incessantly in your ears. Of course the troll is dead, his eyes (red and blue, and four horns, and too many teeth, a thinner and deader version of Sollux oh god what the fuck) are wide open and glassy, unblinking. His jaw is slack, his skin is ashy, he isn't movi --

Vital signs detected.

"Holy shit, I'm coming down there," Sollux says, evidently deciding to join the call now that things have gotten interesting.

"No no no what the fuck stay up there!" You pick your way across the slippery ground, squinting at the tendrils of fuchsia. They haven't seemed to react to your presence. When you dip a toe cautiously in the pool and they don't try to eat your foot, you throw caution to the winds and leap onto the exposed column, scrambling up to get at the troll.

"Don't panic," Zahhak says, and ha ha who's panicking you're not panicking what the fuck. "He's merely a conduit for the engines. The main systems are currently powered off. He should be unresponsive. I am coming to the engine room now."

You reach up and grab one of the hanging tendrils to steady yourself atop the pile, sheathing your sickle so that you can press your fingers to the underside of the troll's chin. Sure enough, a faint pulse flutters there. "What the fuck," you mutter again, tilting his chin up to get a better look at his face. The same sharp cheekbones, the same curve to the nose and overbite. You'd think this was Sollux if it wasn't a half-corpse.

The troll's cheek nudges into your hand. A long, hissing breath that sounds an awful lot like, " _Signless_ " escapes his lips.

Being the badass, successful, and stoic rebellion leader you are, you shriek and fall into the pool.

"Are you dead or what," comes Sollux's tinny voice through your comm once you've dragged yourself out, sopping wet and praising every god in existence that your tech is waterproof. "I'll be there in thirty seconds."

"No, no, god dammit, you don't understand, I'm not saying don't come down here just to be a contrary asshole this is really fucked up Sollux turn the hell around you're like the last person who should see this."

"I know you're not saying it to be a contrary asshole. Here I come anyway."

Fuck, you hate him.

Zahhak arrives first, his hair pulled back in a ponytail and sweat beading on his forehead. His mouth twists with distaste as he walks into the room, surveying the troll like he's appraising a piece of machinery. "Crude."

"He's alive, Equius," you say, squeezing water out of your uniform.

"I am aware."

"No, no, he just fucking spoke to me, he's alive, you have to get him out of there -- you have to get him out!"

"Commander," he says, quiet and strained, "I believe that to be a physical impossibility. Are you certain he spoke?"

"He -- he moved, he hissed."

"Hmm. Likely just an instinctual reflex. I'll run some diagnostics," he says, which is when Sollux enters the room.

Sollux doesn't blanch like you were expecting him to. He just floats a few inches above the ground (like an asshole who the hell doesn't bother to walk having psychic powers is no excuse for being such a tool), his head tilted to the side, eyes narrowed as he takes in the scene.

"Look, douchepan," you say, catching him by the arm and trying to drag him toward the door, "let's get the hell out of here."

He shakes you off, not even glancing down, his gaze fixed unblinking on the other troll.

"Sollux," you say again, willing patience into your voice, "maybe once in a while you should fucking listen to me when I tell you not to come places. Let's go."

Instead of starting for the door like he should, he floats forward. You think he's going to try to speak to the other troll, or at least get some kind of up close data, and you can't begrudge him that. But instead of floating upward, he ducks down and dips his foot into the pool, not unlike your own test.

A tendril breaks the surface and wraps around his ankle so fast you almost miss it, yanking him toward the surface.

"Captor!" Zahhak reacts before you do, thrusting his arm into the pool and tearing the tendril in two, giving Sollux a chance to float out of reach before more can pull him under. You dive forward and catch his leg, tugging him back to earth before he can aggravate the ones on the ceiling. As soon as his feet touch the ground, he unwraps the remains of the fuchsia and winces. You aren't sure why -- it wasn't that tight, right? -- until he draws a yellow-coated, wickedly sharp stinger out of his skin.

"Well," he says as he straightens up again, expressionless, "they appear to either respond to psionic power or my genetic code. We've learned a lot tonight."

You drag him out the door with you, and this time he doesn't fight you, and the husk entangled in the wires does not move.

~0~

You take it upon yourself, as a blackrom partner who's rightfully disturbed by watching his kismesis almost get eaten alive by freaky tyrian biografts, to message Aradia and tell her that Sollux is a dissociating wreck who needs his moirail. He snarls at you for it, but she comes, of course she comes, so at least that festering part of the ordeal is being taken care of.

"I did not fucking make this up," you tell your own moirail later, as she brushes your hair. "The Helmsman is alive."

That's what he is, the manifestation of the ship itself. His pan encompasses the systems and the systems run through his pan, and the bioware that hooks him into the engines has melded itself seamlessly into his nervous system, and he has been kept alive through life support systems and tyrian powers for millenniums. More than long enough to shred his scraps of individual consciousness and assimilate into automated system notifications.

"Karkat, sweetheart, I'm as disturbed by the practice as you are," Kanaya says, which you highly doubt. "But there were no abnormal responses to any of the diagnostic tests. He isn't thinking independently. He isn't suffering. At least, not anymore."

"He called me Signless."

"He hissed."

"I'm not making this up!"

"I know. I know." She puts the brush aside and squeezes your fingers instead. "But it's been a very long time since you slept. Get some rest, and I promise you that when you wake up I will go with you to the lower decks, and we will figure out what's going on."

"You still think I'm full of shit," you say. "You're just bribing me so I sleep."

"Absolutely." She stands, offers you a hand, and. Well. It's a good bribe.

You make the mistake of checking your husktop before you get into your 'coon, pulling up Trollian, since that's where you get your casual messages and also you want to make sure no one's died in the hour since you last spoke. Instead you have unread messages from a contact with a name that makes your blood instinctively turn cold.

\--battleshipCondescension  [BC]  has begun trolling carcinoGeneticist  [CG] \--   
BC: tell them II wIIll 2erve the new Empre22 faIIthfully   
BC: there II2 no need for a replacement.   
CG: HOLY SHIT, WHAT?   
BC: the other captor doe2 not need to be helmed and II do not need to be retraIIned   
BC: thII2 2hIIp belong2 to the current Empre22 and II would not 2eek to undermIIne her rule IIn any way   
BC: 2o too do II belong to her and II wIIll 2erve her faIIthfully   
BC: you do not need to helm the other captor   
CG: SOLLUX ISN'T A FUCKING HELMSMAN.   
CG: NOT EVEN FUCKING CLOSE. NOT EVEN BEING CONSIDERED TO BE A HELMSMAN, THE EMPRESS IS REWORKING THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF THE HELMSMAN PROGRAM.   
CG: WHY AREN'T YOU TELLING HER THIS? OR ZAHHAK? I'M NOT REMOTELY A TECHIE OR EVEN INVOLVED IN THIS SHIT.   
BC: reworkIIng the helm2man program doe2 not 2ound practIIcal.   
CG: WHAT.   
CG: YOU ARE A FUCKING SHELL OF A PERSON.   
BC: II mean for keepIIng our hold on the outer reache2 of the galaxy from crumblIIng   
BC: we have no matchIIng power 2ource be2IIde2 p2IIonIIc2   
CG: OK, WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THAT.   
CG: WHY ARE YOU BEING ARGUMENTATIVE ON THAT ANYWAY? I THOUGHT YOU JUST GOT THROUGH INSISTING THAT SOLLUX NOT BE HELMED, PRESUMABLY BECAUSE YOU WANT HIM TO STAY AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE AWAY FROM A HELMSRIG AT ALL TIMES.   
BC: ye2.   
BC: II would ju2t prefer not to be lIIed to   
BC: IIt would not be practIIcal for the Empre22 to 2top the practIIce of helmIIng   
BC: 2o II take the IIdea of "reworkIIng" wIIth a graIIn of 2alt   
CG: SOLLUX ISN'T GOING TO BE HELMED, FOR FUCK'S SAKE.   
CG: EVEN REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU WANT, I WOULDN'T LET IT HAPPEN. I'M NOT AN ASSHOLE.   
CG: WELL, THAT MUCH OF AN ASSHOLE. SOMETIMES.   
CG: YOU REALLY SHOULD BE TALKING TO THE EMPRESS HERSELF ABOUT THIS.   
BC: IIt II2 not my place.   
CG: BUT IT IS YOUR PLACE TO TALK TO ME?   
BC: oh.   
\--battleshipCondescension  [BC]  is offline!--

Shit.

You are such an asshole.


End file.
